I've met as many people who were addicted to video games as I have who were addicted to pot.
The reason its not addictive is because it leaves your body so slowly. In many ways it triggers many of the same kind of receptors that other drugs do which people develop a physical addiction for. The difference is you don't "withdraw" from marijuana, so your body never feels addicted to it. It absorbs into your fat cells and leaves your body slower than almost any other drug. As a result, your body never really goes through any real highs or lows in terms of its concentration in your body. This is why the drug isn't physically addictive and your body never "compels" you to get more, like your body would if you withdrawing from heroin or nicotine or even alcohol. All of those substances leave the body quickly.
It is psychologically addictive, but ANYTHING can be psychologically addictive, including video games, masturbation, rubbing yourself with a spoon, or whatever you can imagine. Banning something because it is psychologically addictive would require banning all kinds of things and is a horrible standard.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
